Posts Tagged With: Train station

When we were disembarking from the free Danube River Cruise, My Aussie Mate remarked on how quickly the water was moving. Upon checking it out myself, I realized she was right but didn’t clue in on how the speed and extremely high water levels were about to impact my life in the next few days. Sadly, I just went about my business doing the tourist thing the best I could with my sprain and got ready to be on my own from the moment I jumped on the train to Vienna. Everything was just business as usual until the day I had to get on that train to Vienna. What set that day apart from the ones before it was that My Aussie Mate was leaving at the crack of dawn to catch her flight back to Dublin so she could be at work on time. We bid adieu when she left to catch her taxi and I went back to sleep thinking that she was on her way. What I forgot to calculate into this equation was that she would hop into a cab with a moronic driver who was about to take her out to the middle of nowhere. Without going into all the gory details, her idiot driver had caused her to miss her flight which lead to work screaming at her to get on the next available flight to Dublin – hell or high water! Between the texting, trying to ensure she wasn’t lost in some remote part of Budapest, and looking up flight details in order to help – no sleep was had by yours truly. By mid-morning, we were reunited once again only to say goodbye as it was my time to leave.

Photo of a town close to Vienna taken from a news article from June 2013

I left her as she settled down for a quick nap before attempting to fly back to Dublin once again. As for me, I quickly made my way to the train station and was comfortable seated and contemplating a cat nap as the train was pulling out. As my eyes were getting heavy with sleep – a man started yelling at us and sadly, the only words in English were GET OUT! I had no idea what he was saying and nobody was able to translate. There were only 3 of us that were English speakers and we were baffled as to what was going on as all we knew was the train was nowhere near Vienna. With no idea what the hell was going on, we followed the crowds off the train and across the tracks until a little tiny hut of a train station was visible. Upon entering the hut, I realized that it was nothing but a shell of a building that was just being occupied by what look like the train before us. There were no free walls to lean up again and barely a square inch that I could claim as my own. Christ on a bike!

Photo of Vienna borrowed from news articles back in June 2013

As I started to wonder what the hell I was going to do, this blonde hurricane of a woman came through screaming that she’d gotten a cab to Vienna and she could take 3 more if we were willing to split the fare with her. I know I always say never let anyone transport you from location A to B as this is how you wind up in a garbage bag but there was a desperation in the air that made me jump up and tell her that I was in. Right after that, a handful of Koreans followed suit and we marched ever so quickly around the corner to where the cab was waiting for us. In my head I was thinking this could be the beginning of a horror movie but proceeded to take a seat and hope for the best. The blonde lady was in the front seat next to the driver talking a mile a minute as if she already knew him – none of which I could understand a word of so I really couldn’t tell what was going on. The Koreans were quiet and waiting on her every word for the next set of instructions. I decided that despite how tired I felt, this was the wrong time to take a nap. Instead, I hatched up a kamikaze dive and roll strategy encase we pulled off the highway and looked to be going somewhere sinister. Luckily for me, I never had to put this plan into action as all the road signs were pointing to Vienna and after about an hour, we pulled into the city.

Photo from a town near Vienna taken from a news article back in June 2013

It may have been a little miracle but I had made it to some random street corner in rainy Vienna. What the blonde lady was able to tell us in the car was that the Danube River was flooding due to the amount of rain and we were lucky ones who got out as she’s spent a few days trapped in that train station in the past. As we parted ways, I looked for the metro sign so I could make my way to the hostel and get myself a wifi connection to figure out what was actually going on and what my plan of action would have to be going forward.